Friday, June 24, 2016

Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly is widely acknowledged to be the first YA, young adult,
novel. It was published in 1942 and Daly very likely did write it at age
seventeen.

I found Daly’s book to be a
great time capsule of certain aspects of the Midwestern lifestyle that my
mother would have experienced. My mother’s family lived closer to the earth than
the families depicted in the novel. My grandfather had six kids to feed on a
laborer’s salary.

What rang true were Daly’s
descriptions of gardens, trees, birds, and even the insects. She made the water
in the lake and rain that fell on the roof come alive in such vivid reality
that I had to marvel at the skill for such a young author.

Elm trees have been gone for
so long that I’d forgotten about their lacy foliage. Likewise, walking across
the grass and stirring up clouds of powdery-winged moths. I had to go outdoors
in the early morning darkness to see if insects still swarmed around the street
lights—they didn’t. It made me feel that my little section of suburbia was
something of a desert for life forms other than humans.

However, I can’t say I liked
how Daly treated her teens. They were so bound up with artificially formal
rules of how to fit into that society there was no room for the different or
adventurous young woman. They would be punished by being ostracized and shunned.
The guys didn’t fair much better. They were two-dimensional and hardly real as
they were slotted into their assigned roles.

This book was published after
the attack on Pearl Harbor and I couldn’t help
feeling the dread of knowing all this wide-eyed innocence would soon come to an
end in the worse possible way.

Yes, Seventeenth
Summer was a window on an ideal, too perfect past. But it’s not a bad thing
to be reminded of where we might have been … once. It can show us how much
we’ve lost.

Friday, June 17, 2016

I’ve been trying for last
couple of years to write a review of each book I’ve finished reading. Usually
posting them on Goodreads first, Amazon second.

My first reviews were very
brief, but that didn’t bother me because best-selling authors don’t need that
much from me. However, local authors are a different story; they should be given
extra attention and effort.

Take the time to write a
review. The size doesn’t matter; it’s a small bonus with potentially big
dividends for local authors.

My point: Give
your local authors a boost by reviewing their work.

Here is my review for an
author and lecturer at the upcoming David R. Collins Writers’ Conference in Davenport, Iowa.

Edisto Jinx by C.
Hope Clark is our return visit to the chaotic world of Callie Jean Morgan, a
former Boston police detective who has relocated
to the palmetto lined streets of the South
Carolina paradise. Callie’s life has been in deep
disarray since the death of her husband two years earlier. She and her teenaged
son, Jeb, are seeking refuge in the peaceful resort community that holds
comforting ties to her past. But serenity is hard to come by when panic attacks
plague her attempts to blend into the close-knit community of year-round
residents.

Callie is haunted by more ghosts from her past life than her
psychic next door neighbor, Sophie. Callie’s cop instincts seem to fail her as
she spirals down into crippling self-doubt. The lifeline for Callie finally
comes in the form of an auxiliary police badge and the return of her trusty
Glock sidearm. They give her the weight and authority to pursue an
investigation into a strange string of beach deaths that no one else wants to
acknowledge as suspicious, related, and menacing. Everything falls into place
as Callie hits her stride and shows the locals how real policing is done. The
vacation community learns to trust her as she tames the panic attacks and
begins to trust herself again.

Friday, June 10, 2016

The MWC’s social mixer meets
at Bennigan’s, Rock Island,
where there is good food, wine, and conversation. So of course THE question
comes up: “Who’s your favorite author?” It always leaves me stumped and
stuttering.

I feel my best answer should
be “Whoever wrote what I’m reading now.”

First off, memory is the
unfortunate issue for me; I can never recall facts and details fast enough. But
my slowness to respond also means that I’m immersed in whatever book club
selection I’m reading at the moment.

Also, off the top of my head
… no one author stands out for long within the cloud of books I’ve read over
the years. I know that’s not right. I’ve had plenty of favorites to choose from
going back to the science fiction I started reading in high school. But
favorites come and go depending upon my current interests.

Which raises the new
question, perhaps a better question: Who
or what got you started reading? Because something had to trigger that urge
to keep on reading for enjoyment or learning. What ignited that first spark?

For me it was movies. I would
watch something and then develop the need
to know more. That need would send me to the library to find the source
material. That’s what led me to the early science fiction books: War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, 2001, 1984.

For my sons, the first spark
came from books on the Civil War. Later on, I took to reading selected passages
from adult books like: Gary Paulson’s Winter
Dance; and Michael Crichton’s JurassicPark and Congo.
So, yes, you can read out loud to teens. I found there’s nothing like a
censored book to peak their interest.

I’m letting my book clubs select my current favorite
authors for the time being. I like the sense of discovery: from Margaret
Atwood, to Jenny Lawson, and all the others. I like them all for different
reasons—until the next month’s meeting and a new adventure begins.

Friday, June 3, 2016

Last week I went to the MidwestWritingCenter’s
annual meeting. At the conclusion of the business meeting a drawing was held.
The prizes began with a nice selection of MWC Press books. The grand prize for
many years has been a full enrollment for the David R. Collins Writers’
Conference held in late June. That amounts to three full days of
workshops, readings, and a concluding lunch. An over $200 value in writerly
bounty.

I’ve watched other people win
and thought “Well, maybe next year” or “Maybe at the next Iron Pen contest”.

As it turned out This
Was My Year!

And I almost missed it.

The people on either side of
me won and I had to check out which books they picked. I also figured the luck
for my row was already used up. So I was distracted when the next number was
called. I looked at my ticket. It was my number. I had to ask “What did I win?”

It was the Big One!

I was surprised and happy all
at once. (I’ll have to look up a better way to describe that in The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide To
Character Expression by Angela Ackerman & Becca Puglisi—later.)

So now I have a new set of
lucky numbers.

I have to say that in this
and in a great many other ways I’ve been luckier with the MidwestWritingCenter than with any of
the state lotteries.

My thanks for being there and making the odds better for
all of us writers.

About Me

Mary Davidsaver is a graduate of the University of Iowa and a retired jewelry designer. She has written for local newspapers since 2007. She is a member of the Midwest Writing Center who has won two Iron Pen first place awards. In 2013, she was the first local writer to win the Great River Writer's Retreat Contest. She has published her first novel with MWC Press.
Mary was presented with the Outstanding Literary Artist Award at the May 24, 2017 annual meeting of the Midwest Writing Center.